Devlog #6 - give me a break! room.

Hey. Hello. Check this out. So first thing's first, a new update is incoming! 0.1.4 (skipping 0.1.3 because that looks unlucky) should be arriving this weekend for Da Bank patrons. A lot of new and exciting features in that one, but more importantly there's two new sex scenes to unlock! These ones are for the Joker enjoyers in the house, Joker x Jacks and Joker x Queens. All you gotta do to unlock them is fail the House. And because a new update is so close, a reminder to get your name in the credits by Thursday night (5/15, 11PM EST).

Alright, devlog time. 

So those new scenes that we're adding aren't just more content for people to jerk off to. I mean, it is, but it's also prep and experimental work on how we want to make CGs in the future. One of the issues was actually making the scene work.

Hey it's Noriko, getting railed! Dissecting it a bit, the scene has 2D art over a 3D background. Why not all 2D? I thought it'd be too much work for TT and also I wanted CGs to look like they take place in the same space as the game, which means having to use a 3D background. 

And it was a fucking nightmare lol. Camera tricks aren't new technology, plenty of games will do bizarre things to fake the funk on perspective (for example, the Halo ring in Halo 1 is extremely tiny and close when you look out the window from the Pillar of Autumn) and when this scene was made, I was rushing to get scenes done so we could have our first release. But the workflow itself was also deeply flawed. For each girl we decided "Ok, each get 3 scenes, one with Jack, Queen, and King." Okay. Then the following happened 12 times.

• "What would be hot? Draw that."

• I wrote around what the scene was.

• TT draws a gorgeous scene with no background.

• I export each phase of the CG as separate PNGs.

• Using the guidelines of the 3d layer, I placed the sprite in fSpy and then exported the perspective in blender to get the right camera angle to THEN export to unity.

• Import that into Unity, using the camera, dress up the scene.

• Uh. Hope it works.

And for the most part, it worked! But it was sloppy and took a lot of small adjustments constantly to look good. So here's the thing. We want to add girls. We want to add new CGs. We gotta be more efficient about it. So I proposed the following workflow.

• First we have actual pre-made rooms.

• We choose a camera angle and an idea/pose.

• Then Taylor draws over it, and we write the scene.

That's so much better and efficient! If you ignore the fact that "just have pre-made rooms" is 20 steps in of itself, like a Bon Appetite recipe telling you to already have chopped onions, minced garlic, washed and picked thyme herbs, and a slab of meat that was dry brining 24 hours in advance.

Regardless, this time I wanted to be a lot smarter about it. First, I wanted to know what the room actually looked like. So I made a room in IKEA home designer, and asked Taylor to make concept art for the palette and vibe.

The concept art gave me art direction for what the room would end up feeling like, even if I didn't stick to it 100%. With different angles, and measurements of the furniture, I was able to make a mock up for size references in blender.

And then. I modeled. I did all of these in one day, and a few more later when I realized I forgot some furniture.

Texturing took a little longer because I wanted to find a way to texture furniture that didn't suck. So I looked at furniture at Models-resource and studied some of the textures that came with couches and similar chaise. It uh. Didn't work great at first.

A good couch for a survival horror game, not this one.

I'm not an artist, but I really wanted to learn how to do this in a way that was fun and looked good. I remembered a really cool technique I learned a few months back, using gradient textures. The way it works is (tldr) instead of making UV maps or painting directly on the model, you have swatches of the colors you want and just move the UV over to where you want it! If that doesn't make sense to you, imagine it like this: it's easier to just wrap a box in patterned paper than it'd be to meticulously paint the pattern on the box. Here's a link to the article, a really good read. Thanks to this, it took me just another day or two to completely texture all of the furniture.

Here's what the end result looks like!

As you can see, pretty good! Now we have a break room to use for when Joker fails his employees and has to– wait a minute. The couch is fucked up.

And fixed! It's also so easy to make changes now. Literally just drag the UV region and boom, done. Just a matter of exporting the .FBX into Unity after making adjustments. 

You can even see how little of the texture map was used by this room! Which is great because that means I can reuse this material for future furniture in other rooms, and mix and match objects. In Unity, objects with the same material render at the same time, which makes the performance great. Especially since there's no lighting system in Joker's Trip and most models are pretty low-poly, that means most of the performance bottlenecks are gonna be from image sizes.

Anyway, see y’all this weekend!

-LG